hayden ✸ district two {done

hayden.

She was perfection. I hadn't any other word, not one that I could find upon hard-backed books filled with yellowing parchment and faded ink. There was no other syllable to describe her, no other sound that sounded just as right on my tongue. My teachers, the one a family who I didn't care for nor need, left me to told me that it was not something to strive for. Perfection was impossible. An impossible idea meant to tear others down, to ruin lives. But she was not. She was nothing so harsh, nothing so evil. She has always been perfect in the sweetest way possible. Perfect like a first snow, blanketing the world in something pure and untainted. Perfect like dew dripping off of a flower's petal.

I don't think I understood it at first. What the bubbling in my chest, the kind of heat that filled the whole of my body whenever my eyes found her really was. Books and numbers, those came easy. Bright red A's marked upon the top of my papers were not something rare, something I was unaccustomed to. I was told that I was special, a cut above the rest. I was ordered to act superior when all I wanted was to be hers. Because the rest of the world didn't matter the moment soft lips stretched across pink cheeks and I was caught up in the beauty of it all.

For someone as smart as me, love was far too complex a concept to grasp.

I've known her since before I knew how to breathe. Before my heart beat it was hers, wrapped up in soft white palms and clutched to a chest I have so often laid my head upon. I only met her after my eighth summer, however, after I was orphaned by choice. By a mother who held me close the moment I took my first breaths and then threw me away. I don't remember much of that time, the time before her and before Harvard Orphanage. Perhaps I have blocked it out, as screams tend to my nightmares and the sound of flesh shattering echos in the moments where nothing else is happening.

Not that I've ever told anyone of these dreams, these fluid rivers snaking in and out of the folds in my brain and staining them bright black. Not even Delilah, whom certainly owns every bit of me, is plagued by the maybes of my childhood. I do not care enough to delve deep enough into a past that was surely meaningless.

Some nights I crawl under the covers of her bed when nightmares trap screams behind my lips. I suppose there is a rule, and rules are things that I usually dare not to break, forbidding the children in this old mansion to share space like this. Pressing myself against her side like I do, hair draped over her shoulder as gentle murmurs send me into something more peaceful than sleep. But in those moments, it is nice. I do not care about the atrocities committed by feigning ignorance and doing what I'm sure I should not.

Besides, the thrill of disobedience is intoxicating. I can imagine getting drunk off of the adrenaline, of sneaking out of windows left unlocked and exploring the district that I have never seen much of. They don't let us leave this place, we cannot stray too far. Sometimes I think that we are dogs, chains wrapped around our throats to pull taught when we have wandered too far away. Sometimes I see them, pretty girls with eyes lined black, with soft skin I am told to hide away bore with pride as they walk about the world as though they own it.

Nights when I am feeling particularly bitter, I wish to become them. I want to knock every carefully embroidered towel into the trash and tear every skirt made to reach my ankles. It's a ridiculous thought, of course, I could not imagine being so crude when I have strove to be nothing but a perfect lady the whole eight years I have sat myself in these halls.

And the best ladies are the most deadly.

They teach us how to kill here, how to swing a sword when loose fabric clings to your waist and shoes lift you three inches off of the ground. We are told to be beautiful, told to be a trophy to sit upon the arm of a man. And then we are told to press steel against his throat dare he ever lay a finger upon perfectly smoothed skin.

But I have never held much interest for the men I so often hear of. The prince charmings and the bad boys other girls coo about in our free time. Men, I have heard, are harsh. There is nothing soft about the harsh angles of their bodies and the way their jaws are shaved to a sharp point. There is nothing like Delilah in these men, nothing like the soft taper of her waist and dark hair that falls to the bottom of her shoulders.

Emotions are confusing, a step away from the concrete I find solace in. And she is chaos in her own right, beautiful painful chaos that I simply wish to lay my hands upon and to kiss the black ink she so often prints into her flesh.

But I do not. And perhaps I do not know why. I insist upon protecting her, wrapping an arm around her waist and drawing her into my side every chance I get. My heart aches, almost panicked in the moments that she is away. Because she is chaos and she is pure, she is open and good and everything that is bright in this world and she could be so easily ruined that I cannot shake responsibility.

Sometimes I think the reason I was born was to keep her safe.

But that's a ridiculous notion, as she does so much more for me.

We are puzzle pieces fit together. It does not matter if we were made that way, it does not matter if the picture we come to create is what it was meant to be or perhaps its own new disaster.

We are simply we.

And I don't think that'll ever change.